The End

The lethargic Princess sat on her throne and watched the shadows. They lurked around her gleaming palace like rats in a brig, silencing delicately tittering Royals and slaves in their drunken evenings off-duty. They slid between the walls, making eyes at her, mocking her crown as to say, "All that glitters is not gold!"

What a daunting experience it is to find one in your bedchamber when the moon shines. To watch it dance, twist it's ugly face into a smile, feel a certain warmth toward it because when one is so tired, anything can seem amicable.

She remembered a lining of berry milk on it's teeth when it beared them and that summoned away her compassion, woke her and made her send the lady maid to the kitchen to check the food supply. She'd found it empty. The Princess had screamed.

Thunder rolled through the kingdom and when the Princess shivered, icy fingers pricked her spine and a voice beneath a low A natural on her childhood grand piano growled in her ear, 'Cold, Princess?'

Whirling around, she fiercely ordered it to "Show yourself, or the guards themselves will rise and throttle you until your end!"

Invisible pixies did a jig on her arms and her knees weakened, 'Our end, Princess? You cannot understand...

We are the end.'

The jig ceased and her lungs fluctuated again, hands clammy and cold.

What enemy would plague her with such an uncommon and unusual foe? For she was at war, and her opponents were apt to be frightened of her. Her army, the epitome of malicious prestige.

She returned to her bedchamber and her lady maid applied powder to her burning cheeks. She then pulled back her marvellously purple curtains and gazed down into her grey kingdom. Deserted. The men, fighting abroad. The children, starving in her streets, but what could she do? She could not neglect to feed her visiting Royal cousins to keep some peasants vibrant-

'Only to learn their fathers are DEAD!' hissed the shadows.

The Princess screamed and collapsed onto the marble floor, her hands on her ears. The lady maid named Olga fawned over her, but the Princess shrieked,

"But why won't you leave me!?"

Olga rushed away to fetch some malt whiskey for Her Highness, who was digging the floor with her nails, looking murderous and quite insane.

The episodes happened for weeks, weakening the Princess to the point she could no longer wear her heavy crown or drag with shrinking arms herself out of bed.

She would dangle a bell for her maid and spent daylight watching the corners of the chamber with rapid, baggy, fearful eyes.

'Tired, Princess?' they taunted, and licked the fat tears off of her cheeks, 'Weary? Hungry, perhaps?'

She reached for her bell, and it dropped to the floor, rolling away.

'Shame to have to move, isn't it,' they whispered maliciously as she grimaced, trying to roll out of her impossibly tangled sheets.

'They can't hear you, Princess. They're too far away...'

"No!" she said weakly, her lungs contracting.

'Even if you try to scream like you've never screamed, like you're dying...'

"I'm not," she gasped, her pale skin slapping the marble floor as she fell, "dying!" She edged closer to the bell and held out her hand to touch it.

It rolled away again without physical provocation and she screamed.

'But don't you remember, Princess?' the shadows laughed, 'We are the end.'

"No!"

'And your soldiers saw us, too,' they continued, stroking her shoulders with needle claws, 'when they ended. They asked us to do this for you...'

"No," she choked, and tripping on her night dress she landed with a 'thud,' and glass shards splintered across the marble with her. The shadows combed her hair with their fingers, gentler now.

'They wanted you to know, Princess. To see the war you created. It was yours.'

As her last breath escaped her body, she saw a droplet of blood trickle down a clean stream, in a forest littered with the shells of her own men.

'This is why they didn't like war, Princess.'

As the shadows quieted, she did, and the sky wept into the kingdom, shedding it's tears for everything they'd lost... and for nothing at all.